Political Ecology - Relationship To Anthropology and Geography

Relationship To Anthropology and Geography

Originating in the 18th century with philosophers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Thomas Malthus, political economy attempted to explain the relationships between economic production and political processes (Ritzer 2008: 28; Perry 2003: 123). It tended toward overly structuralist explanations, focusing on the role individual economic relationships in the maintenance of social order (Wolf 1997: 7-9). Within anthropology, Eric Wolf pushed political economy towards a neo-Marxist framework which began addressing the role of local cultures as a part of the world capitalist system as opposed to earlier political economists and anthropologists who viewed those cultures as “'primitive isolates'” (Wolf 1997: 13). This approach to ethnography, however, still lacked an attention to environmental effects on political and economic processes and is still sometimes criticized for looking to structural explanations for cultural phenomena (Perry 2003: 123).

Conversely, Julian Steward and Roy Rappaport's theories of cultural ecology are sometimes credited with shifting the functionalist-oriented anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s toward a more scientific anthropology, incorporating ecology and environment into ethnographic study (Perry 2003: 154-157). Yet, these theories were later found to be lacking by many anthropologists as they were criticized for “separat economic from other aspects of life, even in the process of showing the ways in which they interact with one another” (Perry 2003: 157). In other words, cultural ecology was good at exploring function in the nature-culture dichotomy, but the conclusions drawn from that theoretical position tended to ignore the impact of environment on political and economic factors.

Recognizing these flaws in political economy and cultural ecology, geographers and anthropologists (Wolf 1972; Blaikie 1985, Greenberg & Park 1994; Hershkovitz 1993) worked with the strengths of both to form the basis of political ecology. This approach focuses on issues of power, recognizing the importance of explaining environmental impacts on cultural processes without separating out political and economic contexts. These approaches tended to emphasize local, minority, and indigenous knowledge (Ervin 130) while moving away from privileging a Western nature-culture dichotomy.

The application of political ecology in the work of anthropologists and geographers differs depending on what the scholar is seeking to emphasize. While any approach will take both the political/economic and the ecological into account, some approaches will place more emphasis on the political while others will place more emphasis on the ecological. Some, such as geographer Michael Watts, focus on political impacts on access to environmental resources. This approach tends to see environmental harm as both a cause and an effect of “'social marginalization'” (Paulson 2003: 205).

Others, such as Andrew Vayda and Bradley Walters (1999), criticize political ecologists for pre-supposing “the importance…of certain kinds of political factors in the explanation of environmental changes” (167). Vayda and Walter's response to overly political approaches in political ecology is to encourage what they call “event ecology” (Vayda & Walters 1999: 169), focusing on human responses to environmental events with an eye on political reactions to the events instead of presupposing the impact of political processes on environmental events.

As with any theoretical approach in the social sciences, political ecology has its strengths and weaknesses. At its core, political ecology makes great strides in attempting to contextualize political and ecological explanations of human behavior. But as Walker (2006) points out, it has failed to offer “compelling counter-narratives” to “widely influential and popular yet deeply flawed and unapologetic neo-Malthusian rants such as Robert Kaplan's (1994) 'The coming anarchy' and Jared Diamond's (2005) Collapse” (385). Another problem is the neo-Marxist nature of political ecology in a world where policy decisions are dominated by a global capitalist system (Walker 2006: 388-389). Ultimately, applying political ecology to policy decisions – especially in the US and Western Europe – will remain problematic as long as there is a resistance to Marxist and neo-Marxist theory. Founded in 2010 in Brasil and Canada, the Socio Ecolo Evolutionists are influenced by Thoreau, Reclus or Gandhi. They struggle in a local-global perspective to defend the diversity of ways of life, the choice and a global Pact for collective survey.